Women in the European music industry!
Venue: Suecia
The low proportion of women in leadership positions, not to mention to overall male dominance in the industry in general, remains a pink elephant in the European music industry’s living room. Germany’s leading music industry magazine MUSIKWOCHE and Promus, the SPOT+ conference organizer, have therefore decided to dig deeper and try to transparently figure out why this is.
Meet: Virginie Berger/Managing Director at DBTH Agency (FR), Julia Gudzent/Head of artist liason and talent buyer at Melt! (DE), Sarah Sølvsteen/Agent at Skandinavian (DK), Eve Fairly-Chickwe/A&R at Kobalt Music (UK), Jessica Brandt/A&R Manager, Universal Music Publishing Scandinavia (SE). Moderator: Andy Inglis/5000 MGMT (UK).
Presented by MusikWoche, Promus & SPOT+
Virginie Berger
Virginie founded Don’t Believe the Hype, a leading agency in strategy and business development for music technologies, creative industries and innovative IT companies in France and worldwide. Its client list includes Twitter, Sonos, Trello, Niland, Playpass, Ubifrance, Mixgenius, Bandzoogle, France Digitale, Musicmetric or many French Ministries.
Julia Gudzent
Julia is responsible for event series such as Introducing and Certain People at Berghain and working for festivals such as Melt Festival, Berlin Festival, Splash! Festival, Lollapalooza Berlin. Previously she has worked as a freelance tour manager, but decided to settle down in Berlin and join Melt! Festival as its second employee. Since then she has been head of artist liaison and promoter for new talent.
Sarah Sølvsteen
Sarah works as an international agent for MØ, The Minds of 99, Cancer, WhoMadeWho a.o., and has previously run her own management company, Silverstone Management, managing Danish artists such as Saybia, Kashmir and When Saints Go Machine.
Eve Fairly-Chickwe
Eve is A&R Manager at Kobalt Publishing in London. She is currently working with artists such as LÈON, Jack Garratt, The Big Moon, Prides and Loyle Carner. Eve began as a scout at Kobalt in 2013 and was promoted to A&R Manager in 2015. Before working at Kobalt she studied Music Production at The Academy Of Contemporary Music.
Andy Inglis
Andys music business career spans twenty-six years, beginning in 1990, DJing, running raves and record labels, and managing electronic artists. His company now focusses on Artist Management and Tour Management (for the Mercury Prize-nominated East India Youth amongst others) and Mentoring. He also lectures internationally on the Live Music Industry. He would ban guest lists, cover versions and encores.
Jessica Brandt
Jessica does A&R at Universal Music Publishing Scandinavia and has been with the company for 8 years, doing A&R for 2 years. She works with both writers and artists (Maja Francis, Lune, Calle Lehmann to name a few) out of the Swedish office.